Whew! I had a full week at TechEd Barcelona, just getting around to finishing up writing about it. It was great to get out and see everyone, there were a lot of familiar faces. Thanks for showing up and saying hello. I fully enjoyed each and every presentation and interactive discussion.

A special thank you to Gunther Beersaerts for allowing me to attend and present. Got to meet a lot of “the old gang” as well as some people who I’d only known through their blogs, like Ward Pond and Johannes Kebeck. And I got to attend the Belgium/Luxembourg country drinks party, where I had some great technical discussions over beers.

I don’t have exact figures, but because I had the same room for each breakout, I “counted” interest by counting the number of people who showed up. Transactions and Optimizing T-SQL still rule, although there was almost a full room for SQLCLR. And there was more than I expected for Service Broker and quite a few folks for SQLXML. Packed a double “interactive” room for the Powershell in SQL Server 2008 presentation/discussion, although the liveliest discussions were in the “OLE DB and ODBC” and “tell us where it hurts in SQL Server” sessions. The ODBC folks were happy they aren’t being forgotten, it was enlightening to see the numbers using OLE DB and ODBC. Thanks to John de Longa of DataDirect for his input on ODBC/OLE DB and Elisa Flasko for helping me moderate the discussion. A number of people seem quite worried about the advent of LINQ to SQL/EDM and what they see as the upcoming deluge of dynamic SQL and its effect on the plan cache. I’ll have more to write on that subject soon.

Next week is ITForum. I won’t be quite as busy, but I will be doing a few cool talks on Spatial Data in SQL Server, T-SQL improvements in SQL Server 2008 and T-SQL query tuning. See you there.

One Response to TechEd Barcelona Wrapup…and on to TechEd/ITForum

It was very nice meeting you too Bob. Although we did not talk a lot about technical stuff, apart from the extended events part, we did have a great conversation. Maybe the next time you come to Belgium you will get some real beer 😉